Miscellany

A comment on the WSJ Law Blog: http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2015/03/27/former-peace-corps-volunteers-sues-over-malaria-drug/ Commander Bill Manofsky USN(ret) wrote this comment in the Wall Street Journal following the article that appeared about RPCV Sara Thompson (Burkina Faso 2010-12) Sueing The Peace Corps Over Malaria Drug Mefloquine was invented by the US Army at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) during the Vietnam War. For a history of how poorly this was handled, do a Google search for the full text version of the article “A lesson learnt: the rise and fall of Lariam and Halfan” written by Dr. Ashley Croft, former infectious disease specialist for the British military and their expert on Lariam.
The drug was approved by the FDA as a treatment for malaria in 1976 and as a prophylaxis in 1989. In both situations, the safety trials were skipped. The 1989 testing was performed by the CDC on healthy Peace Corps volunteers. The US Army . . .

Over the last few years, the Peace Corps has implemented a series of new policies and procedures aimed at reducing risks for volunteers and providing support and guidance to volunteers who experience, witness, or report sexual assault. The following discussion will be streamed live on the website (http://csis.org/events/event/culture-change-peace-corps) of the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington DC: Culture Change at the Peace Corps APRIL 2, 2015 | 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM

Wall Street Journal By JOE PALAZZOLO Sara Thompson (Burkina Faso 2011-13) sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night and finds her balance has left her. She stumbles to the kitchen. Or to the bathroom. She suffers spells of dizziness when she tilts her head just so, and sometimes for no reason at all. Ms. Thompson, 32, said the symptoms began during her Peace Corps service in Africa, where she took the antimalarial drug mefloquine. In a lawsuit filed earlier this week in Washington, D.C., Ms. Thompson alleges the federal volunteer program negligently provided her the drug without warning her of all the possible dangers. In 2013, the year after she returned from her two-year service in Burkina Faso, a landlocked West African country, the Food and Drug Administration required makers of the drug to add a warning label about potential neurological and psychiatric side effects, including loss of balance, dizziness, . . .

Nan McEvoy, an early employee of the Peace Corps, is listed in a March 27, 2015 in the San Francisco Chronicle as a founding staff member of the Peace Corps. True enough. She was the first deputy in the African Region and in the summer of 1962 traveled through eight African counties for an “on-the-spot survey of Peace Corps project. Later, she became head of the Talent Search Office at the agency, following Bill Haddad, Glenn Ferguson, Franklin Williams, Willy Warner, Jay Rockefeller IV, and Bill Wister, in the job of finding overseas Reps. She was one of the few (and famous) early women Peace Corps Staff members. Nan Tucker McEvoy Nan Tucker McEvoy, the last member of The San Francisco Chronicle‘s founding family to run the 150-year-old newspaper and a prominent olive oil producer, philanthropist and Democratic Party activist, died Thursday morning at age 95. Her death was confirmed by her . . .

Culture Change at the Peace Corps Empowering Volunteers to Report Sexual Assault 10:00AM-11:30AM (EDT) Thursday April 2, 2015 2nd Floor Conference Room Center for Strategic and International Studies 1616 Rhode Island Avenue, NW Washington, D.C. 20036 Over the last few years, the Peace Corps has implemented a series of new policies and procedures aimed at reducing risks for volunteers and providing support and guidance to volunteers who experience, witness, or report sexual assault. Following the Kate Puzey Peace Corps Volunteer Protection Act, Peace Corps’ global Sexual Assault Risk Reduction and Response program is working to create an environment in which volunteers feel protected when reporting the crime and empowered to come forward and seek support. Please join us on April 2 for a panel discussion on the impact of these efforts and progress made by the Peace Corps since the program’s full implementation in September 2013. Our panel will include Carrie . . .

First Lady  Michelle Obama, center right in the back, holds a round table discussion with Peace Corps Volunteers, Saturday, March 21, 2015, in Siem Reap, Cambodia. In the photo to the right is also Director Carrie Hessler-Radelet who went with Mrs. Obama to Japan and Cambodia. The First Lady also met with students who are in the first Peace Corps Training for Let Girls Learn.

Anyone Can Be a Teacher in This Online School New York Times By JONAH BROMWICHMARCH 19, 2015 The Skillshare staff at work at the company’s offices in New York. The company allows users to determine the courses they want to teach and take. A thousand courses are available for $10 a month. Susan Orlean was considering giving up teaching. She had taught courses at New York University and at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College but was finding it difficult to maintain a consistent class schedule while fulfilling her obligations as a staff writer for The New Yorker. “I just started thinking, well, maybe there’s a different way to do this that doesn’t tie me to a physical location,” she said. “And right around that time, Skillshare contacted me.” Skillshare is an online video platform that allows anyone to sign up and teach a class. The company has . . .

by Victor Beattie March 17, 2015 5:06 AM WASHINGTON- First Lady Michelle Obama embarks on a five-day Asia trip Wednesday to launch the Obama Administration’s initiative “Let Girls Learn,” promoting the education of millions of girls worldwide. Ahead of her stops in Japan and Cambodia, Obama and her husband said the inability of an estimated 62 million girls to attend school worldwide should be a foreign policy priority. The first lady wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the fact that tens of millions of girls are not being adequately educated is more than “a tragic waste of human potential. It is also a serious public health challenge, a drag on national economies, as well as global prosperity, and a threat to the security of countries around the world.” Obama said that as of 2012, every developing region had achieved, or was close to achieving, gender parity in primary education. . . .

By DARLENE SUPERVILLE, Associated Press WASHINGTON (AP) – Michelle Obama won’t avoid Cambodia’s human rights record when she visits the southeast Asian nation this week, her final stop on a two-country trip to promote a new U.S. initiative to help millions of girls worldwide attend and complete school, the White House said Monday. The first lady, who is traveling without the president, is scheduled to arrive in Japan, her first stop, on Wednesday. On Friday, she heads to Cambodia. While the purpose of the five-day trip, from March 18-22, is to promote the “Let Girls Learn” initiative she and the president announced this month, Mrs. Obama will discuss the need for an open and inclusive political system in Cambodia and highlight basic values and principles that are important to the U.S., said Evan Medeiros, senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council. “She’s going to have ample opportunity . . .

The Personal Business column in the 3/14/15 issue on “Retiring” written by Kerry Hannon is all about ‘older’ American retiring and doing serious volunteer work with the Rotary Club, Corporation for National and Community Service, AmeriCorps, the Senior Corps…and guess what: The Peace Corps. “The push for older volunteers began in 2011 (not true, we had a significant number of older PCVs in 1962) writes Hannon, “when the Peace Corps began working with AARP to connect more older volunteers with service opportunities. Today there are 7 percent of PCVs 50 or older. “I would like to see that closer to 15 percent,” said Carrie Hessler-Radelet, the Peace Corps’ director in the article. While the Peace Corps is just ‘one’ of the many opportunities where and how senior citizens might volunteer, is does have the advantage in this article of having the only photograph, and that is of Kate Burrus at . . .

Patrick McClanahan (Mozambique 2010-12) joined the Peace Corps in September 2010, shortly after graduating from Penn State with a degree in physics. While in Mozambique, he taught 11th grade math in the village of Machanga along the banks of the Rio Save. His service was cut short by a reaction to the antimalarial medication mefloquine. The effects of this drug left him unable to work for months after returning to the US and they still affect him to this day. When Patrick returned home, he quickly learned that his experience with mefloquine in the Peace Corps was not unique, nor even unusual — but it was preventable. There are safer options to the drug, and since returning it has been his goal to protect future Volunteers from the harm that he and countless others have experienced. The following is a note that Patrick sent me. For Patrick it began last . . .

One afternoon back in 1963 novelist Mark Harris received a telephone call from Sargent Shriver inquiring whether he’d be interested in writing a special report about the Peace Corps. Mark gladly accepted, then waited five months while his loyalty and sanity were investigated (been there, done that), and then he went overseas  to West Africa where he wandered around for ten days in a country he later called ‘Kongohno’ and he also  wrote his one-and-only Evaluation Report for Charlie Peters. Mark Harris retells all this in a book entitled, Twentyone Twice published in 1966. The book has two sections. One is about getting through security, the second is about Africa. The fictional name that he used of the West African country he visited is Kongohno…I’m not sure of the actual country, but I believe it was Sierre Leone. Old timers in the Peace Corps might know the real name of the country Mark Harris visited as a Peace Corps Evaluator in . . .

The death of Father Ted Hesburgh brought back to mind a story I heard about Father Ted and Warren Wiggins that happened in the early days of the agency. As we all know, the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, “Father Ted” who transformed the University of Notre Dame into an academic power during his 35 years as president, died last week. Father Ted was also a key figure in the creation of the Peace Corps. In 1997 I interviewed the late Warren Wiggins about his role in the early days of the agency. For those who do not know, Warren, with Bill Josephson, wrote “A Towering Task” which was a working paper that they sent to Sargent Shriver in early ’61 as Sarge was in the beginning stages of designing the agency. Wiggins came “on board” then, and eventually became the Deputy Director. When I interviewed Warren in 1997, I asked him . . .

Attending the announcement of Let Girls Learn in the East Room of the White House today were Peace Corps Director, Carrie Hessler-Radelet, and these ‘old hands’ from the Glory Days of the agency. Former Senator, architect of the agency, CD Ethiopia, Harris Wofford, Director Carrie Hessler-Radelet, Colombia RPCV Maureen Orth, and former Peace Corps Director Mark Gearan photo courtesy of Maureen Orth